Recently
I was searching for clues about Noni Jabavu’s life and I stumbled upon the pages of the 1935
edition of The Bantu World. I became intrigued by the representation of black
women in the newspaper through a series of articles under the title “Bantu
women on the move”. By exploring the archives of The Bantu World black women’s multiple identities begin to emerge
providing an answer to the question posed by Nomboniso Gasa in the book Women in South African History: “Where
are black women, their multiple voices and multiple forms of
self-representation, which are often far from the ‘heroic’ subject and more
along the lines of fighting for survival and struggling for dignity and
self-expression?”

It is important to contextualize The Bantu World and its significance during the 1930s. In Les
Switzer’s Bantu World and the origins of
a captive African commercial press in South Africa, hedescribes
the context of a reading culture in the 1930s by stating that “literate
Africans constituted about 12.4 per cent of the adult African population by
1931…and the number of registered African newspapers alone was nineteen in
1930—the highest in the history of South Africa's black press.”. He describes
the readers of the paper as

“…[T]he vanguard of an African
middle-class culture in a white-dominated, racially-stratified society. The
petty bourgeoisie were the principal communicators and consumers of news,
opinion and entertainment in the African press for more than two generations
after the first fledgling, independent African journals were launched in the
1880s and 1890s. They were the members and office bearers of a proliferating
number of independent African political, cultural and economic organisations
that sought to generate the accoutrements of a middle-class lifestyle.”

Discovering
the stories and profiles about black women in The Bantu World made me reflect about the messages I have received
about black women’s lives and their agency before and during apartheid. It was
through the discovery of Ellen Khuzwayo’s autobiography Call mewoman (1985), Nokukhanya: Mother of light (1993)—Nokukhanya
Luthuli’s biography written by Peter Rule, A
life’s mosaic: The autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala (2009), that I was confronted
with the miseducation and misrepresentation about black women’s historiography.
It was through the life stories by and about black women, poetry by Nontsizi Mgqwetho,
as well as fiction writing by Lauretta Ngcobo, Miriam Tlali along with other writers
such as Boitumelo Mofokeng who contributed to the Staffrider and Noni Jabavu that I became curious about black
women’s experiences in South Africa’s history. These authors contradicted the
perception that women were at home while men were outside the home. These texts
have contributed to the questions I’ve had about people from my grandmother’s generation
and how they lived during a time that rendered them as minors and people who were
destined to be wives and mothers.

In the
pages of The Bantu World I discovered
a letter Rilda Marta wrote to her readers about her trip to a beauty
school in New York. Mrs Frieda Matthews (Bokwe) wrote about her trip to London and the interesting
young people she met; one of whom was a young Noni Jabavu who was struggling
with her peers teasing her at school. There were also articles about Mrs Charlotte
Maxeke’s journeys to various parts of the
country. The most interesting article I read was about Miss Ellen Pumla Ngozwana.

The
article reads like a CV but when read alongside a description from by Ellen
Kuzwayo’s autobiography about Miss Ngozwana, she seems more interesting (Kuzwayo’s
spelling of her surname is different to the one that appears in the newspaper.
The description however supports that she is referring to Miss E.P. Ngozwana):

“I have in mind particularly Ellen Ngozwane who was
popular and very much loved by all the students. She was also a great friend of
Professor Matthews’ family. She was a charming and attractive woman, dark in
complexion, and well-built, but certainly not stout. She had an excellent taste
in clothes and always looked very elegant…Every time we assessed Miss Ngozwane,
we always found she had no match among the male staff—in our estimation, she
was high above all the bachelor teachers. Our convictions were confirmed later
when we learnt that she was married to an eminent Ugandan named Kisosonkole
(the father of the Kabaka, king of Buganda).”

The
newspaper’s description seems to pale in comparison to Kuzwayo’s richer
description of her teacher. Even though the newspaper’s seemingly rudimentary
description of an example of an educated African woman, it ends with an
interesting twist: Miss Ngozwana is also a writer who contributes to the pages
of The Bantu World under the
pseudonym ‘Pat’. Her writing is expanded upon in the article: “Her recent
moving article on ‘Is life worth living’ proved of great help to many readers.
She is an imaginative writer with a theme of poetic justice”. It is thus not
surprising then that later in the year the newspaper publishes a speech by Miss
Ngozwana which was delivered at Inanda Seminary earlier that month: “The emancipation of women”.

Reading The
Bantu World has confirmed that grand narratives about history are
misleading.

Apart
from the pass protests of the early 1900s and the 1956 march, history would
have us believe that black women were not active participants in South Africa’s
history. This is seen in our history textbooks which are largely concerned with
the grand narratives about history and the big men (often white) who made history
happen. The everydayness of history is seldom as explored suggesting that
people were simply living and waiting for the big moments of history.

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